Methodology

Primary sources first

Law of the game, competition format, tiebreaker or prize money: we check the regulation published by whoever runs the competition (IFAB, FIFA, UEFA, CONMEBOL, each national federation) before turning to press coverage or memory. It is the same standard behind every reference guide on the site, with the source linked at the foot of the page.

Match data comes from Sportmonks: the teams, the kick-off time, the score, the line-ups, the key events and the stadium, and also the stadium photos. We calculate the result projection ourselves, with a statistical model, from the record of past results. It is an estimate. Competition data has two sources, and it is worth saying which serves what. football-data.org serves the table of ten competitions, among them Europe's five major leagues, the Brasileirão and the Champions League; the top scorers and the fixture list of those ten and of the Copa Libertadores, which has no table; and the data for the European Championship and the World Cup. Sportmonks serves the table of the other ten competitions that have one, among them the Europa League, the 2. Bundesliga and Liga MX; the top scorers and fixture list of the fifteen competitions football-data does not cover, among them the national cups of England, Germany, France and Italy; and the last-five-matches column inside the football-data tables, which do not carry that field. TheSportsDB is kept in reserve for the fixture list, when a page's main source does not respond or responds with no matches at all. For the table it does not serve: the public key returns five rows, and the site prefers to show no table at all to showing half a table.

What the archive is

The archive is Soccer Addicted's record of past matches: a database of completed club matches, not national-team matches, going back to 2004. On October 15, 2026, it held more than 170,000 matches from 26 competitions (club leagues and cups from several countries). The data comes from Sportmonks, a sports data provider. For each match, the archive stores the date and the score. When the provider has the data, it also stores the goals, with the minute of each, the cards (yellow and red), the line-ups (who took the field) and the statistics.

Soccer Addicted keeps that data in the archive and calculates the numbers from it. When a chart cites the archive as its source, Soccer Addicted counted it itself, match by match, from Sportmonks data.

The archive has gaps, and they limit what the numbers show. Almost every match from January to June 2024 is missing: the older matches were stored only up to December 2023, and new matches began to be added from July 2024. Before 2015, the goals and their minutes are missing for some matches.

Checked before it publishes

No story goes live straight from a draft. The AI writes the first draft of each story and organises it, but never publishes on its own. The facts are checked against the sources gathered while reporting, and a story goes live only with the editor's approval.

On the match page, when there is a list of goals (who scored and at what minute), that list is put together twice using AI, separately. Neither version sees the other, and both draw on news outlets and sports data sites. The aim is to reduce the chance of error.

What comes out the same both times goes into the list. The page shows the sources that were consulted. If the versions disagree about a goal, one more source breaks the tie, and the version that source confirms is the one that counts. If that source confirms neither, the page shows no list of goals at all.

Sources cited

Every reported story cites its sources at the foot of the text: the real name of the outlet and the true title of the page, linked to the original. The list is not cut short: a story built on thirteen sources shows all thirteen.

It is the public record of how we got to what we published. Each source shows the real title of the page we read, not a summary we wrote ourselves.

Public corrections

When a published story got something wrong, we fix the text and it shows: the story gets a public, dated note saying which claim was false and what the correct source says. The note appears on the story itself, not hidden in the footer.

If the wording of the note later needs to improve, its text can be rewritten, but the date the reader sees stays the day the error was fixed, not the day the explanation got better.

Nothing expires quietly

We do not publish a claim with a hidden expiry date. A title count for a competition still being contested, a group stage format, a number of qualifying places: whenever a fact can change next season, the text dates the number instead of presenting it as final.

When we revisit a reference guide, the date that matters is the date we checked it, not the date it was first published. That is the date the reader sees.

Seven languages

We publish in seven languages, one edition for each: Portuguese, English, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Japanese.

When a published fact is wrong, the correction applies to every edition that states the same fact, each in its own wording.

Artificial intelligence, disclosed

The stories on this site are written with artificial intelligence, under the editorial direction of Lucas G. de Moraes. The AI writes the first draft and localises the story for each edition. The one who decides what goes live is always the editor, never the AI alone.

We do not hide this or treat it as a technical footnote: the editorial policy describes, in more detail, where AI is involved on each type of page, including the match page, which follows its own rule.